A Little Bit Of Outrage For Your Afternoon

[filkertom]

Two articles you might want to read, both at The Smirking Chimp: Robert Parry's report on the press' screwing over of Al Gore, and Cindy Sheehan's anger at the mercenary army in Iraq... the one we pay for. (For further reading on this rather important subject -- effectively an unreported 100,000 extra Coalition soldiers -- read some of these articles by Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book Blackwater.)

Comments

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I think the real problem is that the right wing has gotten a free pass for so long for screaming "liberal bias" every time the mainstream press reports any story, quote, or fact that didn't come straight from the Rush Limbaugh program that a lot of the country, the media companies, and the journalists themselves -- even those who consciously reject it -- have internalized the message. I don't think the treatment Gore gets is any different from the treatment any prominent Democrat gets. I wouldn't even mind that treatment -- much -- if the Republicans got an equal measure of it, but the press tends to treat the Republicans with kid gloves because if they are even moderately nasty to one of them the whole pack scream with one voice and drown out everything else. The media let Clinton get impeached for (maybe) lying about a blowjob, but they let Bush get away with blatantly lying us into a trillion dollar war, stealing two Presidential elections, and a thousand other criminal breaches of the public trust, up to the big story right now of how, having been caught red-handed firing US attorneys so they could be replaced with more reliable cronies (presumably, ones who would give top priority to bogus political charges), tells us repeatedly that he's being "generous" when he agrees to allow Rove to lie speak off the record not under oath to the Congress which is performing its Constitutionally mandated job of oversight.

I don't doubt that the majority of individuals involved in journalism are personally liberal, but between the misguided ethical standards that make neutrality more important than truth and the fact that the right wing is so much better than the left at manipulating the media, the actual bias of our media is so far to the right that we have a whole country that sees scientific reality as crazy left wing moonbattery at best on equal footing with the horoscope or the Sunday sermon.